Deep State

CHAPTER FOUR

Dagmar’s posse rose early and were first in line for the hotel’s breakfast buffet. They saw no secret police; they saw no gamers. The players had been booked in a different hotel, to discourage them from harassing the puppetmasters or breaking into their rooms in search of information.

Where the secret police might be hiding was another matter.

Dagmar carried her bags down to breakfast, not wanting to leave her hard drive in a place where someone could steal or damage it. Afterward she piled her bags into a taxi for an uneventful ride to the airport. While waiting for the Turkish Air flight, she heard from Mehmet that the players had gotten into their buses without incident and were on their way to the airport. To avoid unnecessary interaction with the puppetmasters, they had been scheduled on later flights.

Another meal was served on the flight to Istanbul-Dagmar was amazed at the efficiency of the cabin attendants, who got food and drinks served and cleared in only forty minutes. Two vans had been hired to take them to their hotel. Their luggage nearly filled the first van, leaving room for two people: Dagmar found herself in the van with Judy, the puzzle designer, who was chatting happily on her handheld. The van pulled away from the curb.

“Love you!” Judy said cheerfully into the phone, and holstered it.

Judy wore a long-sleeved blouse that left only rag ends of her tattoos visible at the wrists. She held back her black hair with a plastic headband that had a crown on it, gold-painted points that haloed her head and made her look like a somewhat less spiky version of the Statue of Liberty, albeit one with a lot of mascara and corpse green eye shadow. Her necklace stared out at the world with a couple dozen blue eyes, made up as it was of Turkish evil-eye amulets mounted in silver; she also wore matching earrings and a bracelet.

“Who were you talking to?” Dagmar asked.

“My dad.” Judy grinned. “He worries when I fly-I always call him after I land to tell him I’m okay.”

“You must be close.”

Dagmar didn’t know what it was like to be close to a father-it was an alien concept to her, like knowing what it was like to be an Australian aborigine or a member of the Rosicrucians.

“The funny thing is,” Judy said, “is that Dad flies all the time and it doesn’t bother him at all. He only gets all worried when I fly.”

“What does your dad do?” Dagmar asked.

“He’s a rock star.”

Dagmar smiled. “I guess he must be, if he worries about you like that.”

Judy laughed. “No, really!” she said. “My dad’s Odis Strange, of Andalusian God.”

Dagmar blinked.

“You know,” she said, “when a person says that someone else is a rock star, usually it’s a metaphor.”

Andalusian God had been huge when Dagmar was in nappies. Her parents had their discs, and their single “Nad Roast” was always playing on the jukebox in whatever depressing Cleveland bar her father was working.

She remembered Odis Strange on the cover of Living the Life Atomic, Andalusian God’s first CD. He wore a dark five o’clock shadow, a Levi’s jacket with the sleeves ripped off, lots of stainless-steel jewelry, and hair that was greased up high in a mock-rockabilly pompadour.

She didn’t see much of a resemblance in Judy. Probably she took after her mother.

“I didn’t really know him till I was sixteen or so,” Judy said. “That’s when Dad sobered up and remembered he’d had a family back in the nineties.” She laughed. “He’s really sweet. He looks after me. He paid for my new teeth.” She tapped a brilliant white incisor with a fingernail. “Implants. Even when he was away, his management sent money.”

“That’s great,” Dagmar said. Father-daughter bonding was really not her thing.

“We’ve known each other for months,” Dagmar said. “Why haven’t I known about your dad?”

“People try to use me to get to him,” Judy said. “I’m cautious about who I talk to.”

“That’s sensible,” Dagmar said.

Judy’s eyes blinked brightly at Dagmar from behind her black-rimmed glasses. “And your dad?” she asked.

“He was an alcoholic,” Dagmar said. “He’s dead now.”

“Oh.” Judy’s face fell. “Sorry.”

Dagmar shrugged. “It happens.”

Her mother had worked hard to keep Dagmar from becoming one of those kids who came to school smelling funny. Trying somehow to evade or at least ignore her downwardly mobile status, Dagmar had found refuge in geek culture: science fiction, fantasy gaming, computer-moderated social networks where people didn’t know or care that she lived in a shabby flat off Detroit Avenue in Cleveland.

And there had been books. Cleveland might have been a decaying postindustrial polis that had failed to negotiate the collapse of its tax base, but in its glory days it had built great public libraries, and libraries were cheap, a big advantage in a household where the television could at any moment be sold to pay for vodka. Even at his most intoxicated, Dagmar’s father knew it was pointless to try to pawn library books.

“My dad was never around when he was high,” Judy said. “And he was high for years. But he wasn’t violent or anything.”

“Nor mine.” Dagmar really didn’t want to talk about this. “He was a sloppy drunk, not an angry drunk.”

And a thieving drunk, whom Dagmar did not propose at any point in the next several centuries to forgive.

“Look at all the ships,” Dagmar said.

Judy seemed relieved to change the subject. They turned toward the Sea of Marmara, where dozens of cargo ships schooled in the blue water, waiting for a crew, a destination, a cargo, or a pilot to take them up the Bosporus.

The ships were freelancing, Dagmar thought, just like herself and her crew.

Give them a destination and they’d amaze you with how they got there.

In Istanbul the Great Big Idea crew was booked into a small boutique hotel, a converted Ottoman mansion in the tourist paradise of Sultanahmet, while the players stayed in a pair of larger, more group-oriented hotels in Beyolu, across the Golden Horn. The party’s rooms weren’t ready when they arrived, at 8:45 in the morning, so Dagmar and her planners agreed to gather in the rooftop lounge to plan the next day’s live event, the game’s finale.

The lounge had a bar at one end, closed at this hour of the morning, and glass walls that gazed out upon the Sea of Marmara, the deep blue water where dozens of freighters waited their turn to steam up the Bosporus or to moor at the piers of the Asian shore. In the other direction were the dome and six minarets of the Blue Mosque, pale gray against the azure sky.

When Dagmar came up the clanking old elevator, she found Lincoln sprawled on a couch gazing at the sea, his loopy grin on his face. He was still having the time of his life.

Dagmar, less sanguine, stood by the glass wall and watched a host of gulls, wind beneath their wings, sweep in a perpetual gyre around the minarets of the mosque. Anxiety scrabbled at her nerves with rusty iron claws. The lack of information made speculation impossible.

She didn’t know if she was safe, if any of her group were safe. She didn’t know if the players would be molested when they assembled in Gulhane Park on Saturday morning.

The most ambitious ARG of all time could end up with people dead. That wasn’t how she had intended to go down in history.

She hadn’t killed players yet, though with other people her record wasn’t quite so pristine.

The doors to the creaking elevator rolled open, and Ismet arrived carrying a stack of newspapers. He paused, looking for Dagmar, and then offered her the papers in a hopeless gesture.

“I’m afraid you’re famous,” he said.

He spread the newspapers over one of the low tables. There was a picture of her with Bozbeyli on every paper, either shaking hands with him or sitting next to him. In every picture he was erect and masterful, his eyes alert and commanding. In each image she looked humble and submissive, her eyes turned to the Great Man for instruction.

None of the pictures hinted at the quantity of the president’s rouge and hair dye.

“Would you like me to translate the text?” Ismet asked. “It’s pretty much the same in each paper.”

Dagmar felt her stomach turn over.

“I can imagine what it says.”

Lincoln picked up a section of newspaper, took reading glasses from the pocket of his shirt, and held them halfway between his eyes and the text. “You’re quoted as saying that the whole world knows the danger of terrorism,” he said. “And that even a civilization five thousand years old can be threatened by the bombs of madmen.”

Dagmar stared at him.

“You read Turkish?”

She hadn’t heard him speak the language to anyone, not beyond more than a few tourist phrases.

Lincoln shrugged and put away his glasses.

“I read a lot of languages,” he said.

“You were also on the television news this morning,” Ismet told her.

Dagmar sank into her chair.

“This is going to be everywhere,” she said. “On blogs, on Our Reality Network, on Ozone, everywhere.”

“You can issue a denial,” Lincoln said. “A correction. When you get home.”

“I know how memes propagate on the freakin’ Web,” Dagmar said. “No correction will ever catch up with the original story. For the rest of my life I’m going to be the game designer who brownnoses dictators.”

She closed her eyes and let herself pitch backward onto the cushions, as if falling into her own personal hell.

Behind her, the elevator doors rattled open.

“Dagmar?”

She opened her eyes, turned, and saw Mehmet. He had a concerned look on his face and his cell phone in his hand, and-because Mehmet wasn’t part of the creative team and it wasn’t his job to be here-his arrival set a new anxiety gnawing at Dagmar’s vitals.

“Yes?” Dagmar said.

Mehmet approached.

“I got a call from Feroz. The headquarters bus was stopped and he was arrested.”

The news startled her. Dagmar jumped to her feet.

“Arrested? Can we get him a lawyer?”

“Stopped where?” Lincoln asked.

“Just outside Izmir.” Mehmet turned to Dagmar. “He’s been released,” he said. “But they beat him, and then they took the bus.”

“Beat him?” Dagmar’s bafflement warred with her rising outrage. “Why beat Feroz? He’s just the bus driver we hired.” She turned to Lincoln. “Can we contact the embassy?”

“Feroz is Turkish,” Lincoln said. “Our embassy can’t help.”

Dagmar was disgusted at the idiocy of her own question. She threw out her arms in annoyance at her own thundering great stupidity.

Lincoln continued to ponder the issue. “Probably that’s why they picked Feroz, because they could punish us without causing a diplomatic problem.”

Dagmar turned back to Mehmet.

“Does he need a hospital?”

“He says he’s afraid to go. They might get his name from the hospital records.”

“They don’t have his name?”

“They didn’t look at his identification. They just took him out of the bus and started hitting him.”

Dagmar pulled out her handheld and went over her list of contacts.

“Zafer Musa?” she asked, to no one in particular, and then pressed the Enter button.

Zafer Musa, a matronly woman married to an Australian, was Dagmar’s go-to person in Izmir-Zafer had helped to set up lodging and transportation for the gamers and had cleared the game with the various bureaucracies that had a say in whether Ephesus could be used as a site for the game.

Zafer answered. A many-sided conversation ensued, in which Zafer agreed to pick up Feroz and take him to a clinic, have him use a false name, and pay for his treatment with cash. Dagmar would reimburse any expense.

“Have her take a camera,” Lincoln said. “We want pictures.”

Dagmar gave Lincoln a look, then nodded. She told Zafer to take pictures and then ended the call.

She turned to Lincoln. “We need to hire a bus driver. Quick.”

Mehmet shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “They kept the bus. The Gray Wolves kept the bus.”

So now all the electronics were gone. The cameras, the satellite uplink, the wireless net, the displays. Dagmar reached down to the table, picked up Ismet’s newspapers, and hurled them against the glass wall overlooking the sea.

The papers proved a completely inadequate weapon. They blossomed out, touched the wall with a sigh, and drifted to the floor.

“We are hopelessly in the shit,” Dagmar said. “We are the fucking falling newspapers, and someone’s going to come along and step on us.”

The elevator wheezed open, and Tuna entered with Judy Strange. They carried cups of Turkish coffee and plates of vegetables and gozleme, cheese-stuffed pancakes, all of which they’d carried up from the hotel buffet. They looked at the tense little scene, the scattered newspapers, Mehmet with his cell phone half-raised.

“What is it?” Judy asked.

A long, disjointed explanation followed.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Lincoln said. “Tomorrow’s event can still take place. We just won’t be able to carry it live.”

Dagmar shrank from this idea. Carrying the live events as they happened, to connect the players on the ground with the many more players who participated only through electronic forums, was a Great Big Idea trademark.

“Not necessarily,” Dagmar said to Lincoln. “You still have your massive server set up in Istanbul, right? What the bus has is all the equipment we need to connect the camera feed to the servers-and it’s got all our vidcams, too. So what we need to do is get some new cameras, and then get a connection between our cameras and your server. We don’t technically need the bus for that, but we need something.”

She looked at her speed dial. “I’ll get ahold of Richard.”

Richard wasn’t answering his phone, so Dagmar left voice mail. She holstered her handheld and looked at the others.

“Whether it’s safe to continue at all,” she said, “is another issue.”

“Bah,” Tuna said. “Let them do whatever they like.”

“No,” Dagmar said. “Let’s not.” She looked ruefully at the furniture, the scattered papers, and nudged a chair with her foot.

“Have a seat, everyone,” she said.

They sat-except for Lincoln, who hadn’t ever risen from his chair. Before Dagmar sat, she walked to the window, stooped, and picked up the scattered newspapers. She stacked them in a rough pile, dropped them on a table, and then took her seat.

“We have permission to run an event in Gulhane Park tomorrow morning,” she said. “So the government knows where we’re going to be, and when. And they’ve taken away our ability to cover the game live, so maybe they think they can take some kind of action against us-attack us, even.”

“The players are going to all have cell phone cameras,” Judy said. “And a lot will have video cameras, as well. There’s no way”

Ismet knotted his long fingers. “But does the government know that?” he said. “The Internet didn’t exist when the generals were young. I don’t know whether they understand anything like what your game represents.”

Dagmar recalled the three elderly men and felt doubt slide into her mind.

“Presumably they have younger advisors,” she said uncertainly.

Tuna made a fist of one big hand and bounced it on his knee.

“They know nothing,” he said. “They’re fools; they’re ridiculous.”

“Dare we take the chance?” Judy said. “If they know nothing, doesn’t that make it more dangerous? They could order these Gray Wolves to attack us thinking no one would ever know, and even if a thousand pictures are taken on cell phones, we’d still be attacked.”

Dagmar turned to Lincoln, who was frowning down at the floor between his sandals.

“Lincoln?” Dagmar said.

“I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m trying to work out how much the generals care about world opinion.”

“They seem to care about my opinion,” Dagmar said.

“This game is huge,” Lincoln said. “The generals have every reason to want it to succeed. Attacking a bunch of foreigners in a park isn’t the sort of thing that would bring millions of tourist euros to their country, and so…”

He let the words trail away. He closed his eyes and was silent for a long, long moment. He nodded a few times. Dagmar began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.

And then Lincoln lifted his head, looked at Dagmar through his Elvis glasses, and shook his head.

“Nope,” he said. “You can’t risk it.”

“Why?” Dagmar asked.

“Because,” Lincoln said, “I could be wrong.”

Anger clamped around Dagmar’s heart like a grim little fist. She wanted to jump, rage, wave her arms. Instead she took a long breath and spoke.

“I really want to stick it to these people,” she said.

“Yes!” Tuna said. He pumped a hand in the air. “Yes, very good!”

Lincoln was still looking at Dagmar, his eyes narrowed, as if he was studying her.

“How?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“What are our goals?” Lincoln said. “To damage the regime in some way? To cock a snook at the generals?”

“Cock a what?” This clearly was a new expression for Mehmet.

Lincoln continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted.

“Or are we abandoning the game?” he said. “Or carrying it on in spite of the possible dangers? Or altering the gaming experience somehow?”

The options spun in Dagmar’s head. She returned Lincoln’s look.

“You hired me, Lincoln,” she said. “You have to approve whatever gets decided. And more importantly, you have to fund it.”

“I’m not the creative presence here,” Lincoln said. “Before I can endorse an idea, I have to know what it is.”

Judy Strange took a sip of her coffee, then made a face and put the cup on the table.

“Well,” she said, “if it’s dangerous to run the live event, we’ll have to cancel it.”

Dagmar felt a stubborn resistance build in her to the idea.

“With all respect to Lincoln’s list,” she said, “I think it’s a little out of our league to damage the regime, though I don’t mind cocking the odd snook…” She raised a hand as Mehmet was about to interrupt again. “… so long as it won’t get us thrown in jail.” She turned to Judy. “And as for the game,” she said, “maybe we can alter it so we won’t be running a risk.”

Judy leaned closer to her.

“How?” she said.

Dagmar shifted her gaze to the others.

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “We’ll need to work that out.” She felt the urge to move, to think on her feet, and she surged to her feet.

“Let’s take a walk. Let’s go to Gulhane Park.”

The park was within easy walking distance of the hotel. Their path took them past both the Blue Mosque and its great, crumbling ancestor, Hagia Sofia, which faced each other across tourist-choked roads and a large garden blazing with summer flowers. Along one side of the mosque was the old Byzantine hippodrome, still a long ovoid in shape but now another park. Vast numbers of tourists, far outnumbering the locals, moved among the radiant flowers, past the silver waters of the fountains. Sometimes the tourists swarmed in huge packs, marching along behind their guides, amid air scented with roses and diesel.

She wondered if she could hide her players among the tourists, her buses amid the tour buses. It certainly seemed possible.

But then she looked up and saw the streetlights with their quaint, lacy white heads, and the CCTV cameras attached. A group of soldiers stood by one of the fountains.

It wasn’t necessarily the malevolence of the generals that had put these measures here, she thought. There were all sorts of reasons that this area should be secure-many foreign visitors, irreplaceable public monuments, heavy traffic.

But even so, the brilliant sun-filled park flanked by the two huge domed structures now seemed just a little sinister, just a little too much like a trap waiting to be sprung. Dagmar headed north, skirting Justinian’s old church, then descended a steep road while streetcars hummed past her. Men on the sidewalk shilled for carpet stores and restaurants.

At the bottom of the hill they encountered the outer wall of the shambling Topkapy Palace, with two arched, open gates. Soldiers in white helmets stood by the entrance.

Feeling a shiver of apprehension, Dagmar walked through the gate.

Topkapy was built in a series of irregular, walled courtyards, one set inside the next like nesting dolls. In the center was the harem, where the sultan would have lived with his concubines, children, and mother.

During the course of scouting locations for the live events, Dagmar had learned from Mehmet that the sultan’s harem had been a far cry from the sybaritic paradise imagined by the Western-male-imagination. The harem had actually been run by the sultan’s mother, who made all the important decisions, including which of the concubines slept with the sultan and when and how often. The sultan wouldn’t have gotten to arrange his household to suit himself until his mother died, if then.

But Dagmar wasn’t going farther into the palace, let alone to the harem. Instead she turned left, passed a group of pushcart vendors selling roast chestnuts and simit- a kind of cross between a bagel and pretzel-and walked into Gulhane Park, which was actually between the outer two walls of the palace. The ground sloped down toward the Golden Horn, the path bordered by flower beds and a double row of giant plane trees. The rest of the palace loomed above them on the right, invisible behind the wall that crowned the hill.

A ship’s horn sounded up from the harbor below. Soft morning light filtered down through the leaves of the trees. Somewhere a child laughed.

“It’s a pity we’re not here in spring,” Ismet said. “During the Tulip Festival, there are tulips in all these flower beds. Some of them very exotic.”

“I always thought tulips were a Dutch thing,” Judy said.

“The Dutch got their tulips from Turkey,” Ismet said. “That’s why there was such speculation in tulips at first-they were Eastern and exotic.”

“Speculation?” Judy asked.

“Let’s talk about Tulip Mania later,” Dagmar said. She slowed, then stepped off the path to stand before a statue of Ataturk. Uptilted eyebrows gave the Republic’s founder an elfin caste. She returned his skeptical gaze, then looked at the park around her for the first time since her original scouting trip nine weeks before. Lincoln voiced her thoughts aloud before she could speak.

“This place is unusable,” Lincoln said. “I know why we picked it for the live event-it has limited access, so the players won’t get lost, and yet it’s open, and we can hide a lot of things in here for the players to find. But as far as keeping our people secure, it’s hopeless.” He waved a hand up to the palace. “People on that wall will see everything we do. And we can be completely bottled by closing the two entrances.”

Judy looked around with apprehension on her face, as if she were already seeing the tanks closing in.

“Where else can we go?” Dagmar asked.

There was silence for a moment. Then Ismet cleared his throat.

“Does it have to be Istanbul?” he said. “Can we move the players out of the city?”

“The players are already in Beyolu,” Judy said. “Can we do the event there?”

“Taksim Square?” Dagmar said hopefully. It was the only Beyolu landmark she could remember.

“No,” Ismet said. “Beyolu is full of foreign embassies. The security’s too high.”

“My wife and I live on the Asia side, in Uskudar,” Mehmet said. “We could drive the buses across the bridge, and stage the event there. There are plenty of parks.”

Ismet frowned. “And also the military barracks at Selimiye.”

Mehmet’s expression fell. The group stood for a moment, their general gloom a contrast to the cheerful green of the park, the packs of children with their ice cream, the teens with their MP3 players, the gulls calling overhead.

Ismet looked up and shaded his eyes with his hand. “Look there,” he said, and pointed.

Dagmar followed his gaze and saw a small aircraft silhouetted against the sky, orbiting a few hundred meters above the palace.

“Surveillance drone,” Lincoln said.

High-tech military surveillance drones-the kind that could fly thousands of miles, loiter for hours over the target, and drop bombs or missiles-these were expensive and cost millions of dollars each. But low-tech drones, essentially large model aircraft with Japanese lenses, digital video, and uplink capability, could be built in someone’s garage, for a few thousand dollars.

They were all over the place in California now, where Dagmar lived-floating above the freeways to clock speeders, racing to crime sites to track felons, shadowing celebrities on behalf of paparazzi, and ogling sunbathers at the Playboy Mansion. The drones were cheap enough so that the highway patrol could afford them, as could local TV stations, celebrity magazines, private detectives, and hobbyists who collected candid videos the way other people collected stamps.

“Do you think it’s tracking us?” Judy asked.

“Probably not,” said Lincoln. “I doubt we’re worth following. It’s probably looking for suspicious people around the historic sites.”

Anger simmered in Dagmar as she scowled up at the drone. If the military government was using these cheap flying remotes, they could shift their focus of attention from one place to another very fast. One place, she thought, might be as dangerous as the next.

She let her gaze fall from the bright sky and blinked the dazzle from her gaze as she looked at the silver-green bark of the nearest plane tree. The sound of a ship’s horn floated again on the air.

“There,” she said, pointing north, toward the Golden Horn.

“Yes?” Lincoln said. He peered at the tree-shrouded horizon and narrowed his eyes as he tried to see what she was pointing at.

“We have the event on the water,” she said. “Rent some excursion boats, take a cruise. They won’t be able to harass us unless they scramble the navy and board us.”

Lincoln turned to Mehmet.

“Can we rent boats for seven hundred people on twenty-four hours’ notice?” he asked.

Mehmet gave a slow, thoughtful nod.

“There are a lot of excursion boats in Istanbul, and a good many are tied up three deep waiting for customers. But it would depend on what you’re willing to pay.”

Lincoln raised a hand in a gesture of pure noblesse, like a grand cardinal-archbishop giving a blessing.

“Whatever it takes,” he said.

Mehmet smiled. So did Dagmar. She knew that she could trust in the Turkish willingness to inconvenience themselves in the name of profit.

“What shall I tell them?” Mehmet asked. “Bosporus cruise?”

Dagmar nodded. “Why not?”

Mehmet reached for his handheld and began to page through his rather substantial list of contacts.

Dagmar turned to Lincoln.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Lincoln. “I’d much prefer my brilliant PR coup not end in broken heads.”

Dagmar turned to Judy.

“I’m afraid this means we’ve got to come up with a whole new crossword puzzle by tomorrow morning.”

Judy was looking inward with her usual fierce concentration.

“I know,” she said.

“Can you do it?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” Judy looked across the park at the Golden Horn. “What’s on the Bosporus, anyway? What is there to put in the puzzle?”

“Dolmabahce Palace,” Ismet said. “The Bosporus Bridge. Selimiye Barracks. And…” His voice trailed away. “I’m not sure. I’ve never actually been up the Bosporus.”

“How,” Dagmar asked, “did the Bosporus Bridge avoid being named after Ataturk, like every other major structure in this country?”

He smiled. “There already was an Ataturk bridge, over the Golden Horn.”

“I am enlightened,” Dagmar said.

The party began heading upslope, back to their hotel.

“Fortress of Europe,” Tuna said, adding to the list of Bosporus sites. “Fortress of Asia. That big mosque in Ortakoy, I don’t remember the name of it.”

“Our hotel will have a brochure for cruises,” Dagmar said. “It should list the sights.”

Dagmar’s handheld began to play “ ’Round Midnight.” She reached for it.

“This is Dagmar,” she said.

“This is Richard. I had my phone off. What’s the problem?”

Dagmar was nettled that he had made himself unavailable during work hours.

“Why was your phone turned off?”

“I was with Ismet’s uncle Ertac, haggling over carpets. I didn’t want to be interrupted.”

Dagmar shook her head and sighed.

“What did you buy?”

“Six carpets. One runner for the hallway. Two kilims that I just couldn’t resist.”

She saw Ismet looking at her and lowered the phone to speak to him.

“Uncle Ertac just scored big,” she said.

Ismet laughed. Dagmar returned to her phone.

“Richard,” she said. “Have you ever been in a foreign country before?”

He was surprised by the question.

“I’ve been to Cabo San Lucas,” he said.

“When you went to Cabo,” said Dagmar, “did you buy everything that was put in front of you?”

“I was in college,” Richard said. “I bought all the beer and tequila in front of me, and maybe even some of the food.”

There was a buzzing overhead. Dagmar looked up to see the drone swoop low and then head out of the park toward the southwest.

“I’m kind of worried that I’ve led you into some kind of horrible temptation,” Dagmar said. “Are you sure you can afford all these things you’re buying?”

“I did have to call the credit card company and argue them into raising my limit,” Richard said. “But the carpets are actually investments. Now there’s more opportunity for women in this country, they’re not going to spend their time sitting at home weaving. The carpets are going to become more rare, and that means more expensive. In time, I’ll be able to sell the carpets for a profit.”

He spoke rapidly, trotting out these ideas with what sounded like considerable pride in their form and originality.

Uncle Ertac, Dagmar realized, might just be the greatest carpet salesman in the world.

“It might take you twenty years to realize your profit,” Dagmar said.

“It’s a more solid investment than the dollar,” Richard said. “Remember what happened to the currency a few years back?”

Dagmar remembered all too well. It occurred to her that she was perhaps the last person on earth to advise anyone on investment strategy.

“Well,” she said, “go with God.” And then she remembered why she’d called Richard in the first place. She explained about Feroz and the missing bus.

“We need to replace everything on the bus, and get the receiver and uplink somewhere above the Bosporus where everyone on the boats can broadcast to it.”

“Well.” Richard was suddenly thoughtful. “I think it’s do-able. What kind of expense account do I have?”

“You have whatever’s necessary,” Dagmar said.

Richard’s tone brightened instantly. “Excellent! Are you at the hotel now?”

“We’re on our way there.”

“Avoid the hippodrome, then. There’s some kind of political demonstration going on.”

Dagmar glanced up as she remembered the aerial drone speeding off. Anxiety roiled in her stomach.

“We’ll do that,” she said.

The soldiers at the palace gate seemed more alert. Their officer was talking urgently on a cell phone.

Dagmar warned everyone about the demonstration at the hippodrome. She and her party panted up the steep road, past the great shambling mass of Hagia Sofia, and into the area between the old church and the Blue Mosque. A scrum of tourist buses stood like a wall across their path. Diesel exhaust brushed her face with its warm breath as she wove between the buses. Her head swam as it filled with fumes. As she stepped from the road to the park on the far side, a solemn Japanese man aboard one of the buses raised a camera and snapped her picture.

Ahead were paths, flowers, palm trees, hedges, a broad circular fountain, and the Blue Mosque. The surveillance drone turned gentle ovals overhead. Dagmar dodged a carpet seller before he could even begin his sales pitch-her reflexes were improving with experience-and then her nerves jolted to the sound of gunfire.

Shotguns! she recognized, and hunched involuntarily as if expecting a round of buckshot between the shoulder blades. She wasn’t hit and then looked wildly for the source of the firing.

White smoke poppies blossomed across the park, followed by the hollow roar of a crowd, a roar mixed with screams and shrieks. Dagmar knew the sound too well and realized the shotguns hadn’t been targeting people but had lofted pepper gas into a crowd that, on the far side of the park bushes, she hadn’t realized was so close…

“Run!” Tuna bellowed. Perhaps it was the wrong thought.

Adrenaline boomed in Dagmar’s veins. She couldn’t think of any place to run to except for the hotel, diagonally across the park, and she started a dash in that direction, knowing even as she ran that her path would take her unnervingly close to the spreading white smoke.

Behind, she heard Tuna’s cry of disgust, or despair, but her feet were already moving.

Dagmar was nearing the fountain when a wave of people came stumbling out of the smoke, weeping. The demonstrators had dressed well that morning: the men were in coats and ties, the women in neat suits or headscarves. They were less neat now: crying, sobbing, cursing, faces stained with slobber or with blood… Some dragged signs and bedraggled Turkish flags. A few threw themselves bodily into the fountain in order to rinse pepper gas from their eyes.

The refugees lurched across Dagmar’s path, stumbling over hedges or sprawling across the neat white shin-high cast-iron rails intended to keep people off the lawn. Dagmar dodged, jumped over one of the white rails, ran madly across a brilliant green lawn. The air was full of shrieks.

An adolescent girl tripped and flopped directly across Dagmar’s path, eyes wide, Adidas-clad feet kicking in the air… Dagmar bent to help her rise, then gasped as a dark figure loomed between her and the sun-a man in a helmet and a blue uniform, dilated mad eyes staring at her through the plastic goggles of a respirator, weapon raised to strike…

“This way.” A hand seized Dagmar’s sleeve and snatched her away from the descending club. Dagmar felt the breeze of its passage on her face. The policeman raised the club to strike again, and then Tuna lunged into the scene: the big man clotheslined the cop neatly across the throat just under the respirator’s seal, and the man flew right into the air, feet rising clean over his head, before he dropped to the grass with a satisfying thud.

In what seemed about two seconds, Tuna ripped the gas mask off, grabbed the cop’s club, and smashed him in the face with it a half-dozen times. At which point Ismet took Tuna’s shoulder as well, firm grip on the sturdy tweed jacket, and repeated his instruction.

“This way.”

One hand on Dagmar’s shoulder, the other on Tuna’s, Ismet efficiently guided them through the park, past the berserk masked cops, the shrieking demonstrators, the bewildered, terrified tourists clumping together for safety… The girl in the Adidas had disappeared. Ismet led Dagmar and Tuna to the steep stair that led down to the Cavalry Bazaar. Dagmar and her escort funneled down the stair along with a couple dozen other refugees, then jogged as quickly as they could through the narrow lane between tony shops selling textiles and ceramics, old cavalry mews converted to a high-class shopping mall.

“Where are Lincoln and Judy?” Dagmar gasped, looking over her shoulder.

“We were following you,” Tuna said.

“Are they all right?” Dagmar asked, completely conscious of the uselessness of the question. Either they were okay or they weren’t.

Tuna looked at the bloody club in his hand and then hurled it aside with an expression of disgust. The sudden bright clacking sound of the club hitting the pavement made bystanders jump.

Ismet guided them out of the bazaar and to their hotel. In the street they encountered Lincoln, Judy, and Mehmet, who had taken a more rational route around the trouble. They looked at Dagmar with relief.

“You ran right into it!” Judy said to Dagmar.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I did.”

Whatever it was, Dagmar thought, she was always running toward it, or knee-deep in it, or falling face-first into it, or failing to claw her way free of it.

“It’s how I roll,” she said.